Key notions defined series: 4. Exegesis & Eisegesis

Having completed my main review of the New Testament (and some Old Testament) texts, cataloguing almost 500 passages, I am "celebrating" that milestone by publishing a part of the paper that helps me in the processing and weighing of these texts, which is currently entitled Chapter 2: Key Notions Defined. It also is an opportunity for me to tidy up these definitions.

Here is the next one, minus some footnotes:

4. Exegesis & Eisegesis

Exegesis is the work of drawing out the original meaning intended by the author. It is commonly and correctly understood as a necessary practice for preachers and teachers of the Bible in order to remain as faithful as possible to its message. Nowhere have I seen it better summarised than by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart’s classic introductory work, How to Read the Bible For All It’s Worth. On p. 26 of my 2nd Ed., it reads with a beautiful simplicity:

A text cannot mean what it never meant   

I take this as fundamental and universal. Exegesis is a safeguard against too quickly applying meaning of our own to these texts that were not there in the original author’s mind and introducing extra-biblical foundations into the church, because as Stephen Holmes states this with his usual eloquence: “No reader approaches any text in a neutral and uncommitted manner” .

A lesser-known term for adding extra meaning to the text is eisegesis. While exegesis is careful to take into account contextual factors like time, place, writer, recipients, occasion, literary factors such as genre (is the text a story? A parable? A poem? Wisdom literature? An epistle?) and textual issues (are there any significant manuscript variants in this passage?), eisegesis is often “in a hurry” to get on to what the individual or group in question are wanting to teach and hear, infusing their own message with borrowed authority from the Bible.

Exegesis is absolutely central to the question this paper is asking about the status of the creeds. Some can tolerate some eisegesis on grounds roughly along the lines of: although the author may not have fully known what he was saying, the God who was inspiring and orchestrating the whole thing did know. While this might conceivably exonerate writers such as the composer of Matthew’s gospel, from proper exegetical practice, later authors should not have any more legitimate, spiritual or prophetic authority than you or I. Relaxing exegetical rigour, or trying to sidestep it as I feel Stephen Holmes attempts via his appeal to some kind of “deeper exegesis” , cannot and will not do for the true Protestant.

We must exegete, we must provide hermeneutics, we must not eisegete.

Presented here is my plumb line, which is a widely accepted principle today. Stephen Roy, himself on a theological quest, puts us on a good, common-sense track. When he acknowledges the authority of Scripture like this it makes you really want to listen to what he has to say:

…I propose that a valid theological model must be consonant with Scripture both quantitatively and qualitatively. In other words, we must first ask, does this model deal with all relevant biblical data? And second, does it do so fairly, without misreading texts so they serve a prior theological agenda?
However, it is also a rather modern understanding of exegesis. Early church authorities, such as John Chrysostom, were still pioneering the fundamentals of today’s good interpretative practices. Stephen Holmes outlines the tension well:
[It is understood by Chrysostom that] a text cannot be understood unless we know its author, the context of composition, and so on… But all patristic interpreters are united in seeing the primary meaning of the biblical text as Christological...”

To paraphrase this you could say that the new church approached (Old Testament) Scriptures:

• Desiring and expectant to find Christological references throughout, especially when there is dialogue and the speaker of the text is not identified
• Let us be careful how we go 

The victorious theology of the church in the fourth century was shaped by a prototype exegetical method roughly along these lines, sometimes referred to as prosopological exegesis. The Councils were then the outworking of an early systematic theology, that is an attempt at a more collective or canonical exegesis.

There is garbage out there .... but how much?

There are two points of this post:
1. There is Christian junk out there, seriously stinky.
2. We are okay with scrutinising the Bible, but not the lenses.

Sadly, I just discovered this, which is sad, but I would say almost certainly symptomatic of other unconfessed elaborations. This is definitely not shining like stars among the warped and crooked as children of God, this is simply being warped and crooked generation. (Phil 2:15)". So the boy who came back from Heaven", did not go anywhere. He made it all up, and admits it, the dying, heaven, meeting Jesus, the Devil, being raised back to life... It casts doubt, of course, on other similar stories (which may of course be true). One thing is definite, they sell loads of copies, because people are desperate for the details of what happens next.

But there is also a quote from the teenager, now 16, who has made the confession. It is very simple and reminds me of my own quest. Never thought I would quote a sixteen year-old on here, but there we go!

"I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible."

"The Bible ... is enough... the only source of truth". Sounds like this young guy found God, who could be redeeming for himself something here.

There are so many Christians out there who basically, although sometimes extremely loosely, hold to a Nicene form of trinitarianism (and one key feature of this blog journey has been to discover that there are multiple forms of trinitarianism - in fact I myself am finding myself adopting a non-Nicene form of it, more on that soon). My hypothesis - and this is based in part on my own experience, but also observation of others - is that the Nicene cornerstone of the Christian faith (is it the cornerstone?) is preached, but it goes pretty much unscrutinised. THE BIBLE gets more scrutiny than Nicea, it is respectfully exegeted by believers, seeking to both determine true and original meaning while simultaneously careful to ensure the interpretation does not stray from other parts of Scripture. But not Nicea. That is because Nicea - and a whole procession of creeds, canons and councils to follow, that have to follow to try to clean up the mess made - are lenses through which we read scripture. We do not read the lenses.

We look at the Bible, we look through the creeds. Since the Bible reveals who God is, I am arguing that the lenses are seriously worth checking out if we are serious about knowing the guy[s] we are looking at. My grandmother at the end of her life lost nearly all of her sight. However, as it turns out, a certain tint of yellow lens helped her see contrasts better. She needed a lens, it was not like she could see without it. But the lens makes everything yellowish, and that is key information also. She knew that she couldn't argue that the tree really is yellow because she knew about her lens, its usefulness and its limits.

The creeds hold unbelievable and unidentified influence over us Christians today. Rant over - for now!

Exegetical pressure, exegetical pressures and "Canonical Pressure"

(updated twice from note originally written in September '14. 16/04/2015)

"Exegetical pressure" (Holmes and others - Childs?) is - I am now convinced - not the right term in this whole debate. Of course I may be misunderstanding or not fully processing what Holmes means by this expression, exegetical pressure (hear him respond to questions at the end of his Fuller lecture), but when we see some of the early exegetical processes, I feel nothing short of shocked! It is the very foundations of biblical exegesis that are leading me to question which way does the “pressure” might lead us.

Well, the answer is... there probably is not one exegetical pressure, unless we redefine exegesis in a way similar to Holmes’ suggestion at the Fuller lecture. There are exegetical pressures, plural. Some believe they lead one way, and others another culminating in one general "pressure".

But there is a third way, expounded by Ehrman and others: the authors did not all believe the same thing about Jesus. A trinitarian will say, or at least in my view should say, that is fine, God revealed different aspects to different writers, and even to the same authors different aspects at different times (e.g. nearness of Christ's second coming for Paul in 1 Thessalonians) and it is the beautiful, painstaking, complementary and collective mosaic of revelation that results in such a wonderful finale. This finale thus harmonises these perspectives into a single portrait, approximating the extraordinary fourth-century creed. The unitarians have many texts that are in favour of distinction between God and Jesus in the New Testament writers' mind that do not require in my view quite the same mosaic approach or creedal layering.

But while the battle is being wrought, and different assumptions being accused, they all miss the great assumption that actually unites them, quite possibly into the one faith, although many would disagree with me on that.

This is the assumption:

At the end of the day, the bible must be cohesively uni-vocal on this issue of whether or not Jesus is God, there simply cannot exist a plurality of pressures.

I think we can give a name to this assumption: canonical pressure. Both camps share a wonderfully deep reliance on this assumption and yet often fail to spot their common ground.


Some of this was inspired from the rather engaging debate with Buzzard and White here, where this assumption is not even laid out.